Annons
Annons
"For women, there's this myth of safety," said Jaclyn Friedman, editor of Yes Means Yes, an anthology about sexual consent. That myth goes something like this: If you stay in a group, if you dress modestly, if you don't drink too much, if you don't walk home alone at night, if you check the license plate of your Uber driver, then you won't get raped. And if you do get raped, then you must've missed one of the marks on the checklist.Uber—which has marketed itself largely on the basis of safety—fits into that narrative. College campuses have even promoted Uber use as a way to foster campus safety. After a sexual assault at the University of Southern California, the school sent out a campus alert warning students to "avoid walking alone" and use Uber instead; they reversed that policy after a USC student was later raped by an Uber driver.On Motherboard: Uber's Phantom Cabs
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In reality, women get raped whether they get in real Uber cars or fake ones; whether they're drunk or sober; whether they walk home alone at night or go home with someone they met at the bar. General safety precautions, like background checks for drivers or traveling in groups, are useful but not foolproof. What this results in is a pervasive sense of fear, but also a sense that rape is just an occupational hazard in the business of being a woman who chooses to leave her house.Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris, an urban planning professor at UCLA, has extensively studied the relationship between women's fear and transportation. "Every study shows that women are much more fearful of being in public than men," she explained. "It is mostly the fear of victimization, fear of being assaulted, fear of being raped."Loukaitou-Sideris hasn't conducted research on women's fears as they relate to Uber specifically, but she has surveyed transit agencies across the United States and found that only 3 percent of them offer any type of program designed to make transportation safer for women. In her research, she notes that "few researchers, transit agencies, or policymakers have directly asked women riders about their safety needs or sought to identify women's proposals and preferences regarding safe and secure travel."So what would a female-driven solution to the transportation problem look like? Loukaitou-Sideris says one idea is to choose companies with female drivers, like She Taxis, which emerged out of Uber's rape scandals earlier this year. Sutton suggests taking rides only from companies with easily identifiable cars and verifiable background checks on their drivers. Friedman was reticent to suggest measures women should take, saying it would be "just another onerous thing women have to do [to stay safe]," but suggested self-defense classes for women "who feel like there are literally no safe ways to go out."Uber has not made clear whether or not it will make companywide changes in light of the recent lawsuit. In a statement provided to VICE Thursday, a spokesperson for the company said: "Our thoughts remain with the victims of these two terrible incidents. We proactively worked with law enforcement in Massachusetts and South Carolina at the time to share information and aid their investigations. Both drivers have been permanently removed from the platform."The new lawsuit hopes to, at the least, undermine Uber's claim that they are the "safest rides on the road." Which makes it hard not to conclude that for women, there are no safe options.Follow Arielle Pardes on Twitter.